RAID

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is stored on all drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to your hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced with no service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.